The Breaking Time

Housekeeping

Good lord, I've neglected this space for too long. But a lot's happened in the last few months, and it's far past time for an update.

For one thing, in addition to my already-busy day job, I've started doing a lot more freelance work this year. I've written fairly regularly for NSFWCorp (subscribe now), including The Zero Tolerance Generation, a major piece of investigative journalism I'd wanted to do since my Coilhouse days, along with plenty of musings on the South and politics in our fractious time. I've also started writing some cultural stuff over at Airship Daily, starting with a piece on House of Cards and its vision of a Dickensian Black-Ops State.

In an earlier year, this might have gone in this space, so it's somewhat a sign of success that this has been silent while more pressing projects have loomed.

As someone who writes for a living, I have to prioritize paying work over personal, even when I want to write 3,000 words about a societal collapse almost no one remembers. Additionally, the publications above are also great places run by excellent people, and they're paying for important work too. I also have to balance my work schedule with being a good partner and friend while managing to stay somewhat sane/healthy.

So, while the Breaking Time will not remain vacant in the way it has for awhile, it will change. This will remain an open space for notes, random thoughts, observations, and off-the-cuff predictions or scenarios. But you'll see less essays and long-form pieces (from me at least, if people submit interesting ones, I'm always happy to run them).

It will also remain open for any others who volunteer to write on these themes; I've been fortunate to have some great contributors here, and this remains open for them (and new ones) too.

To the readers here, thank you, especially for continued support and patience. I hope to have at least some short work up here soon, and I think this will remain an interesting space for years to come.

Best,

David Forbes

Is generational identity dead?

Forget this crap. (Also, if someone knows the photographer for this one, tell me)

Something interesting emerged in this discussion over at NSFWCorp about millenials' generational identity (it's locked for subscribers, but it's also $3 a month, so you should totally remedy that). 

Simply put, with a few notable exceptions — socially liberal, used to the internet, economically precarious — I feel largely removed from the popular story about millenials that's developed. No one in my social circle lives with their parents. They all have a ridiculous work ethic and pull long hours at whatever jobs they can find. Rather than delusionally entitled, they're realistic to the point of bleak cynicism.

All generational identities are massive generalizations to begin with, riddled with exceptions. But something has shifted, perhaps to the point where a Baby Boomer-style common culture is impossible.

Previous sweeping "generations" — the Lost, the Greatest, the Silent, the Boomers — came of age in eras of less inequality, broader social institutions, and a more cohesive mass media. Today, generational identity as we know it is probably dead.

This isn't to say that almost everyone 18-30 isn't shaped by some similar experiences, but it's easier to have a common perspective when there are three television channels, a tycoon's son still has to go for a draft physical, or when the entire country goes to war. That world is gone.

Hell, in 1930 12 percent of American men were part of the Freemasons; it's impossible to imagine any single organization today commanding that kind of influence.

Instead, the media environment keeps fragmenting, meaning parts of the same age group are exposed to widely varying cultures depending on their own interests. The increasing class divide further segregates the scions of the better-off into their own universes. The wealthy have always led different lives, of course, but the chasm has widened to the point their young are divorced from the experiences of others.

I've hoped for a strong millenial identity, partly as a counter to the get-thee-to-a-fracking field scoldings we often receive. But maybe the landscape is far too fragmented now for that to ever occur. The cultures that emerge won't have a common identity in any but the broadest sense.

Instead, they will be different shards, adapting to the world facing them in a thousand ways, or heading to hell purely by their own compass.

Ending rape culture: less apologies, more consequences

An apology would be good. Firing all three would be far better.

In the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict and the despicable reactions of CNN's commentators, there's a petition demanding a public apology from CNN.

That's laudable, but I think the approach leaves something to be desired. Rape culture's incredibly deeply embedded in many different parts of society, depressingly so. A big part of decreasing that is education and changing cultural norms. But consequences are also vital, and they don't get as much attention. While the military has an epidemic rape problem, for example, Helen Benedict's groundbreaking reporting found that "if a commander won’t tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen." Something about the prospect of life in Leavenworth tends to focus the mind.

So whether organizations like CNN help spread this nonsense or not has far less to do with how apologetic they personally feel and far more to do with how scared they are of public backlash. Public figures stopped spouting as much racist tripe when it became clear it would ruin their careers and their social lives.

Likewise, vital as education is, rape culture will start truly crumbling when anchors, administrators, managers, and bosses that ignore or actively encourage it get fired or turned into social pariahs. It will take another hit when sentences for rapists are measured in decades instead of months, when police devote actual resources to catching them, and when prosecutors hand out less lenient plea bargains.

Deterrence and changing the power dynamic can, hell must, play a role in social progress if it's to have any lasting impact. Next time, the push should focus less on statements of repentance, and more on measurable consequences to show some change is actually taking place.

Farewell Coilhouse (and may it rise again)

Coilhouse commanders Nadya Lev and Meredith Yayanos. Image by Star St. Germain.

Last Wednesday, Coilhouse, "a love letter to alternative culture" magazine and blog near to my heart, announced an indefinite hiatus. Nadya Lev and Meredith Yayanos have both been struggling with health issues and "in its current form, Coilhouse is not financially solvent."

Yeah, I teared up.

For five years the Coilhouse crew produced one of the most beautiful, unique creations to grace the ever-evolving media landscape. If you're interested in alternative culture or simply love good writing, check out some of their greatest hits. There's a few of my pieces in there, along with a lot of incredible writers grappling just about every subject under the sun. Their amazing print issues are also available as free pdfs.

Up to their last day, Coilhouse intelligently tackled issues like misogyny in industrial music, race in the gothic subculture and fashion as identity.

My final piece, a personal take on alt culture's relentless spirit ended up being the last before their farewell, something for which I'm honored beyond words. 

Coilhouse gave me a chance when I'd not had much published outside of local reporting. They were willing to say things like "hell yeah we'll give you a column on deviant sci-fi!" which, believe me, is not something a writer hears very often. They pushed me hard, with honesty and respect, to expand my perspective while improving my craft. I was far from the only one.

Thank you, Nadya, Mer, and everyone else involved. You've already made the world a better place. I thank Coilhouse for how it's helped all of us who came in contact with it, and I look forward to its revival.

Until then, 

David Forbes

Why we can build the f'ing Pyramids

Not aliens, just us.

The other evening, I was visiting my friend David Gray (who designed our logo) and we stumbled upon one of those terrible documentaries on the Pyramids that channels ostensibly devoted to learning regularly churn out.

Inevitably, these documentaries bribe a good actor to lend their authoritative voice to narrating a torrent of pseudoscience, coincidence and insinuated bullshit that basically boils down to "humans with such simple tools couldn't possibly have built such wonders! It must be aliens!"

I've always found these documentaries particularly loathsome because of how badly they underrate human capability. At their heart is the same insulting assumption as the "nobles must have written Shakespeare" tripe: poor or primitive people can't possibly create amazing things.

David, who expected a more historical look at the topic, grumbled and turned it off. Within minutes, he found this:

That's Kelvin Doe, a 15-year-old from Sierra Leone who's built his own batteries and transmitters from pieces he salvaged from the trash. He's even founded his own damn radio station. 

Awed, we watched for a while, before David finally spoke.

"And that," he said. "is why we can build the f'ing pyramids."

Amen.

Life in the so-called space age

by Damien Williams

A shot from Felix Baumgartner's epic jump.

The government sees space as a possible warzone.

At about 39 minutes into the Oct. 22 debate, the president says that we need to be looking toward cyber-security and space as the military concerns of the future. Now, the budget of NASA has been partially under the remit of the Air Force since its inception and the borders between the two groups (three if you count the Jet Propulsion Laboratories) are very, very porous. NASA shuttle capabilities have been used for defense satellite placement, and defense scientists lent a hand to civilian projects and research (e.g. NEAT).

Now, ever since the Reagan administration — when some clever idiot decided to reference a series of then-popular movies — the public has known that military interests have had a very clear presence in space and satellite creation. This all started even further back than then, actually, as the entire reason humans went to space in the first place was the Cold War Era pissing contest which found its pinnacle in Mutually Assured Destruction.

It was this MADness that spread out and infected everyone born or raised under its auspices, and so we get a space race and Star Wars. So it isn't really news that "Future US Military Concerns Will Have To Look At Space," or whatever it was the President said. What's surprising is that we have the first President in nearly 24 years who's gone about saying as much, whose specifically stated military agenda have included space.

But is it really that surprising, when we think about it?

Holding up a funhouse mirror: An interview with Vermin Supreme

One of the many fan-made posters for Vermin Supreme.

This is the second of two very different interviews I did while covering the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte that I felt were worth highlighting in their entirety. The first was with blogger and activist Imani Gandy.

Longtime prankster Vermin Supreme has been running for a variety of offices — some of them non-fictional — since the 1980s. Wearing a boot on his head and promising a free pony for all Americans (along with zombie power and mandatory tooth-brushing) if elected, his 2012 run for the Presidency came to greater prominence when he glitter-bombed fundamentalist Randall Terry during the New Hampshire primary and showed up for numerous protests throughout the year. I talked to Vermin Supreme while he was preparing for his own "victory rally" in Charlotte.

So why are you running for President? 

Because I want to make America a better place, but still even.

But still even?

Still even better.

How?

Ponies, the secret ingredient, of course.

Ah, and why the boot on the head?

When I get in a different environment it serves different purposes. When I'm actively campaigning for the Presidency, after the primary, it's become somewhat of a trademark. Different people read different symbolism into it, “we're gonna boot 'em out” or the jack-booted thugs or a boot on the face, the Orwell reference.

But ultimately it's just something I started putting on my head in a rather absurdist, surrealist tradition. The people liked it and responded to it. Out in the streets, in the police environment, it's a disarmament technique. I'm disarming, through my charms, to officers who might otherwise see me as a threat if I was without the boot. If I was a normal-looking wild guy talking shit over the megaphone, I think I'd be perceived differently than with the boot.

It sort of signifies the jesterishness, the commitment to this absurdist aesthetic, it's a shorthand. Sometimes I've worn a clown nose in the past to telegraph that. It draws curiosity. I get into a lot of conversations, meet potential voters. Of course it draws the media, I've been saying as part of my media critique that the boot is a pile of shit and the media are the flies buzzing around it.

Culture and action: An interview with Imani Gandy

Image courtesy of Imani Gandy

While at the Democratic National Convention, I did a lot of interviews. I'm still working on a larger piece on my thoughts about the DNC in our Breaking Time, but two interviews in particular stood out — for very different reasons — enough that I felt they deserved to be featured in whole.

The first is with activist and blogger Imani Gandy, who founded the Angry Black Lady Chronicles and the Team Uterati coordinating resource for feminist action. She's advocated an aggressively pragmatic approach to politics, often clashing publicly with other progressives about President Barack Obama's actions and drawing attention to what she perceives as misogyny and racism among some leftists. We talked about divisions among liberals, different approaches to activism, and how race plays into today's politics.

How did the Angry Black Lady Chronicles start?

I started a pop culture blog with a group of women in 2008, and we were tossing around ideas of a column I would do, titled something like “Ask a black lady.” I was just kind of throwing it around, and I don't know why but I just decided my column would be called Angry Black Lady chronicles. I don't really know why, it just sort of came out of nowhere.

Then, when I stopped blogging with them, I decided to move my column onto its own blog, and it just become angryblacklady.com 

And then it got contributors, etc...

I started out blogging on my own in 2009. I went on medical leave. I had a pituitary tumor. That's sort of the cause of the anger, because I would have hormonal fluctuations. Have you ever been around a first trimester pregnant woman?

Yes.

You know how they get real irritable? Flashes of anger for no reason? I'd get that, but at the most ridiculous things, like “that light went out! Goddammit!” So that's kind of where the angry moniker comes from, but I also like to poke at people because of the stereotype of the angry black woman. Then when people meet me they're like “wait, you're not that angry,” and no, I'm very nice person, but I can be pretty strident in my writing and on Twitter. I like to juxtapose those, like a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde type thing.

I started blogging on my own in 2009, I picked up my first two contributors in 2010, right around the 2010 elections. It's right around that time that I dropped all the pop culture stuff and became fully political, because I started to get really frustrated with the way progressives on the left were hounding President Obama for stuff that I thought he shouldn't be hounded for, like the public option and “why didn't you close Gitmo?”

I felt like there were facts about how the administration had done things and facts about how he didn't have a Democratic majority for as long as people think that he did. I just began to get really frustrated.

I also began to get really frustrated at what I saw as underlying racism on the left.

The old gold cross: The mutation of the American political convention

William Jennings Bryan, carried victorious through the 1896 Democratic convention

If I walk out the door from where I live, away from downtown and into the rich, quiet part of town, I will encounter an old house where William Jennings Bryan spent his summers. According to local legend, he had a soundproof room where he could practice his oratory.

In the summer of 1896, Bryan — then a young, populist Nebraska congressman — took his famous booming voice to the Chicago Coliseum, where the Democratic Party was holding its convention.

The Democrats at the time were deeply divided on a number of topics, most immediately whether to issue coinage in gold or silver as well. It sounds dry, but the issue was one of those political icebergs, striking at deeper problems of class and power. With no certain nominee for President, Bryan took the stage, broadening his condemnation of gold into a fiery attack on the power of the wealthy:

We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!

---

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Forget the currency issue; Bryant's genius was to capture common outrage so perfectly that it's still energizing to read.

Thundering to the assembled delegates, he declared "you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." He finished, arms outstretched, and the crowd went wild.

The results were a populist wet dream: "the Great Commoner" Bryan won the nomination over fat cat incumbent Grover Cleveland and became the first liberal to head the Democratic Party. The convention was one for the books: a genuinely suspenseful battle for control of the country's politics.

Now, I'm leaving for Charlotte, just down the mountain, where the Democratic Party — 116 years later — will again have its convention. To say "they don't make 'em like they used to" is an understatement. The nature of the event is the mirror opposite from Bryan's day, and how the American political convention stumbled from popular decision point to stage-managed spectacle is a revealing story.

Zombies, Mutants, Cyborgs and Aliens: Fight for the Future

Welcome back Damien Williams for a riveting rant on, well, the aforementioned bogeymen, and what kind of future our culture is choosing.

Please pick another apocalypse. Image by Quidditch.

I don't like zombies. I don't mean I'm afraid of them, or that they skeeve me out. I mean that I don't like the current use of them as trope, or a modern cultural cipher. I told you this the last time we spoke, and I told you that I'd tell you why.

You see, back in the day, when Romero was using zombies to talk about consumer culture and the death of individual preference in the face of mass markets, a zombie horde was a potent symbol. It was crushing, endless, homogenizing death. Why do you think Dawn of the Dead takes place in a mall? It was a terrifying indictment of what Romero believed was happening to our society.

Later, when the zombie symbol came to be applied out to Western society as a whole, and not just its consumerist leanings, the fast zombie became the stand-in for the hyper-connectivity and infectious nature of concept, idea, and emotion. Unthinking Rage just spreads and spreads.

That was all well and good. The problem is, zombies don't represent that anymore. Honestly, so far as I see it? Zombies don't represent anything anymore. The modern zombie is an empty symbol, representing only itself. The fight against zombies is now only the pure expression of futility, of never giving up in the face of odds which will defeat us. Zombies are just about Fear. They are collapse and terror and, yes, also the changes that survival of terror wreaks on people. But, in the final offing, I think that's boring.

I'm what some might call a pop culture junkie. I'm interested in all aspects of the popular media (even if, as I say, I don't exactly enjoy every single one of them), because I believe that our pop culture is reflexively connected to the wider culture. It tells us what we're thinking, it tells us how we're feeling, and in turn it influences those thoughts and emotions.

Pop culture amplifies and exaggerates our existing beliefs, distilling them down and reflecting them back to us in a glittering panoply of spectacle and story. What this means for you and me is that, as long as I'm here at The Breaking Time, I'll very often talk to you about the nature of our society — and our perception of its imminent and immanent collapse — through the lens of our pop culture and what it is doing for and to us. If the ascension of “Reality” television is Jean Baudrillard's nightmare scenario, then the rise of zombie apocalypse narrative is mine.